STORY OF THE SINO-JAPANESE WAR 381
areas and the general insecurity make this impossible. Could one learn to harden oneself to Japanese rape of Chinese women, execution of civilians, burning of surrendered soldiers in closed matsheds or by pouring petrol over their heads, bayoneting of babies, rounding up of young men, shooting of refugees in water, sinking of fishing junks and wholesale bombing of civilians—could one harden oneself to all these unimaginable atrocities,* unanimously reported by neutral witnesses in all areas, one might take a long view and regard them as the greatest single blessing uniting all classes of the Chinese people and strengthening their spirit of resistance as nothing else could have done. Since God's creation of man, no race or nation has subjected the population of a fellow-nation to greater atrocities with greater consistency, ruthlessness, arrogance, cruelty, indecency and self-demoralization on such a scale as the Japanese have done in China. No conqueror in history proved himself less fit to rule. If a rudimentary sense can tell one that to rule means to offer a minimum of security and decency of life to a conquered people, the Japanese have not got it. For the appeal to patriotism to resist the invaders among classes that cannot be reached by this appeal, the Japanese soldiers have substituted a more elementary appeal to sheer security of life and protection of their women. A small cigarette-shop owner whose interest in life is only to make a living would probably not mind a foreign rule, but even a cigarette-shop owner does not want to see his wife, sister^ mother or daughter raped before his eyes. The "boche" of the Far East has made the "boche" of the West appear by comparison like an advanced type of human being, and Japanese "bushido" must go down in history as merely "Yellow bocheido" (-do is the approximate Japanese equivalent for -ism, a transformation from the Chinese word for Too in 6tTaoism"). The significant thing is that bushido as the samurai's code of honour has been completely exposed. The notorious fact in Shanghai and other Japanese-occupied areas is that there is rampant corruption, not only among the Japanese soldiers, but also among the Japanese officers, both in the form of petty
*See the documentary record in H. J. Timperley's What War Means: Japanese Terror vn China (Gollancz, London).